Hello
Firstly, thank you to everyone who has contributed to the great apache project.
I understand that if a CGI process is launched then gets stuck, if the CGI process keeps quiet, the apache server will not 'know' the http connection has broken so will not 'know' to kill the CGI process. The stuck CGI process and the accompanying apache process will then needlessly use system resources indefinately.
In a worst case scenario, the stuck CGI process will lock some server resource possibly causing many other CGI processes to get stuck, bringing the server down. (I attribute a recent crash to this).
A great solution for administrators would be to set a timer. If the CGI program hasn't given any output for the given time, the CGI process is killed.
Nick, take a look at the perl module Apache::Watchdog::RunAway http://search.cpan.org/dist/Apache-Watchdog-RunAway/ http://search.cpan.org/dist/Apache-Watchdog-RunAway/RunAway.pm which does exactly what you want and comes with a little daemon.
To operate it needs to be able to fetch the scoreboard, which can be done by either Apache::Scoreboard if you run mod_perl, or by a stand-alone C module mod_scoreboard_send.c. Both live here:
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Apache-Scoreboard/
-- __________________________________________________________________ Stas Bekman JAm_pH ------> Just Another mod_perl Hacker http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide ---> http://perl.apache.org mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://use.perl.org http://apacheweek.com http://modperlbook.org http://apache.org http://ticketmaster.com
